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We are delighted to announce the deposit of the 20,000th item into our institutional repository the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). ERA is a digital repository of original research which contains documents written by academic authors based at, or affiliated with, the University of Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers. Holdings include full-text digital doctoral theses, masters dissertations, project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials.

Our milestone 20,000th item is a PhD thesis written by Susan Ahrens at the Moray House School of Education and was awarded in 2016:

2016 Homeless World Cup in Glasgow : image courtesy of the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-36819350)

This work investigates the relationship between sport, homelessness and poverty, and considers the way two social enterprises – the Homeless World Cup and Street Soccer (Scotland) – help overcome homelessness and its associated effects.

Not one to blow our own trumpets too often, I’m pleased to report that during the first three months of this year we have achieved 334,913 page views and an incredible 207,945 downloads from the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA).

ERA contains documents written by, or affiliated with, academic authors, or units, based at Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers. Holdings include full-text digital doctoral theses, masters dissertations, project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials.

Top 10 downloads from the Edinburgh Research Archive during Q1 2016

The most widely accessed items in ERA are an eclectic bunch of materials; mostly PhD theses, but also including an out-of-print civil defence manual from 1949, and a Psychological Screening Test produced by researchers at the University of Edinburgh.

It is pleasing to see that ERA is providing a platform for wide dissemination of materials that would otherwise not easily be available for consultation. We can’t second guess what people will find useful so by putting all our doctoral research online – in a structured format that is indexed by all major search engines – we can maximise the reach of these carefully written words in the hope that it will fall into the hands of someone who would be grateful to read them.